Aspen, July 2026
The second edition of the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival, Figures in a Landscape, took place July 27–31, 2026, at various venues across the Roaring Fork Valley.
Figures in a Landscape was inspired by a title that recurs across literature, cinema, music, and painting, reflecting the interdisciplinary spirit of the program while naming an unstable relationship between subject and setting. The program of commissions, performances, talks, and readings drew upon Aspen’s landscape, a tapestry of raw wilderness and mediated environments, to question how acts of staging and human intervention shape understandings of place and power.
Altamura-Zbengheci was the Creative Producer behind new commissions and performances by Lyle Ashton Harris, Ivan Cheng, and Los Thutanaka.
Lyle Ahston Harris with Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto
On Oracle gathered voice, image, and memory into a “performative montage.” Staged on the rooftop of Aspen Art Museum, the voices of performers accumulated within a field of video projections that interweave imagery, personal stories, and cultural histories, transforming disparate visual and sonic elements into a living archive that echoes and evolves in real time. Developed through a choral structure, On Oracle builds on Lyle Ashton Harris’s earlier explorations of multivoiced narration, assembling oral histories into a layered act of live storytelling.
Ivan Cheng staged one of his emblematic “live situations for camera,” continuously filming himself in real time as he traversed an iconic Aspen landscape. Blending self-reflexive monologue, improvisation, song, and chance encounter, the performance unfolds as a playful feedback loop between action and documentation. Gestures, speech, and incidental encounters are immediately translated into image. The camera creates a shifting dialogue between the live audience and its mediated double as Cheng navigates the space between spontaneity and rehearsal, performance and observation.
Los Thuthanaka—the sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton—performed atop Aspen Mountain, drawing from their recent, groundbreaking musical outputs. Rooted in Indigenous lineages from the Andes, the music reached toward distant peaks, where saturated electronics, electric guitar, and traditional instrumentation met the rapidly shifting light and atmosphere of the early morning.
